Release Highlights

EMF Compare 2.0 is a full overhaul of the design, architecture and code of the project. It aims at providing the same functionality as 1.3 did while lifting the limitations that it presented.

New and noteworthy

Architecture Overhaul

The model that constitutes the core of the comparison process has been fully reworked. What was previously split in two (diff.ecore and match.ecore) has now been merged into a single "compare.ecore" which provides all of the core API for EMF Compare. Furthermore, the number of concepts defined by this core model has been drastically reduced as compared to the 1.* stream.

The API in general has been simplified to ease adoption and re-use of EMF Compare in other projects. For example, programmatically launching a comparison can now be done through a single entry point instead of the previous minimum of two.

Do note that the general process of EMF Compare has not been altered : it is still separated into isolated phases. Matching the elements, computing the differences between matched elements, then merging the changes from one side to the other. However, the differencing process itself has been further divided into customizable units : computing the differences, computing the requirements between distinct differences, computing the conflicts between differences...

Standalone Support

Though EMF Compare was already useable in standalone environments, this has been improved further such that the core of EMF Compare is now only comprised of a single plugin that only depends on a very limited set of other plugins.

Comparison Scoping

EMF Compare 2.0 provides the mandatory architecture and API for the project to handle large input models. Though 2.0 only provides a default scope which ends up in the same functionality as the 1.3 release (loading everything in memory and comparing the input models as a whole), this scope can (and will be) used by the subsequent version of EMF Compare, 2.1, to be able to handle extremely large input models.

Performance Enhancements

Some performance bottlenecks of EMF Compare 1.3 have been identified yet cannot be solved without fully re-thinking the comparison process. EMF Compare 2.0 fixes these problems and is generally faster than the 1.* stream even using the default scoping mechanism.

Quality of APIs

The component lead certifies that the requirements for Eclipse Quality APIs have been met for this release.
All non-API code is in "internal" packages.

End of Life Issues

EMF Compare 2.0 being a full overhaul of the project, its API is not compatible with its previous 1.* versions. A migration guide will be provided in order to ease the adoption effort to this new version.

All API that was provided by the 1.* stream has been deprecated with the 1.3 release (see the 1.3 End Of Life Issues) and is no longer available in its previously existing state.

The extension points proposed by the 1.3 release have not been ported yet to the 2.* stream, but should be pressent in the subsequent 2.1 release.

Commiter Diversity

4 active commiters from Obeo

Cédric Brun (Project Lead)

Cédric Notot

Laurent Goubet

Mikaël Barbero

1 inactive commiter from Itemis

Patrick könemann

IP Issues

The about files and use licenses are in place as per the Guidelines to Legal Documentation.

All other contributions (code, documentation, images, etc) have been committed by individuals who are either Members of the Foundation or have signed the appropriate Committer Agreement. In either case, these are individuals who have signed, and are abiding by, the Eclipse IP Policy. The other contributions of the IP log are not significant or are written 100% by employees of the same employer (Obeo) as the Submitting Committer (http://www.eclipse.org/legal/EclipseLegalProcessPoster.pdf).

All contribution Questionnaires have been completed.

The "provider" field of each plugin is set to "Eclipse Modeling Project".

The "copyright" field of each plugin is set to the copyright owner.

Any third-party logos or trademarks included in the distribution (icons, logos, etc) have been licensed under the EPL.

APIs

Commitment to provide stand-alone comparison feature (Jar that can be used without Eclipse with minimal to no dependencies towards eclipse core Jars).

Non-API classes are separated from the exposed API through an "internal" namespace.

Non-API packages are exported with an internal visibility so that they remain visible but with a discouraged access warning.

Documentation

Documentation is not up-to-date yet.

Bugzilla

No Bugzilla closed specifically for this release, however, all bugs closed for 1.3.0 had their fix up-ported to 2.0 so that no regression would be observed on the up-ported features and functionalities. See the Bugzilla snapshot for the 1.3 release.

Tool usability

Localization : integrated into Babel

Standards

No standard exists concerning the model comparison, though EMF Compare works nicely with any standard-based metamodel.

Since the 1.2 release a specific support for the UML standard is included in EMF Compare. This is also included in the 2.0 release.

However, the 1.3 release saw the inclusion of a specific support for the SYSML standard comparison. This has not been up-ported to 2.0 yet.